Fifteen Eighty Four

No text attracted as much critical attention in Greek antiquity as the Iliad. Homer’s monumental epic was the cornerstone of primary education in ancient Greece, and it remained at the forefront of philological studies for more than a millennium, serving as both a proving ground and a playground for some of the greatest scholars of antiquity.

Treatises devoted to the Homeric poems appeared as early as the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, when intellectuals like Theagenes of Rhegium and Metrodorus of Lampsacus produced the first allegorical readings of Homeric poetry. The cultural prestige enjoyed by the Homeric poems in the Classical period attracted to them a heightened level of scrutiny as well, inspiring the production of dozens of volumes criticizing, defending, and dissecting Homer’s works. Democritus and Antisthenes both authored treatises On Homer, Zoilus leveled aesthetic critiques of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Against the Poetry of Homer, and Aristotle and Zeno both authored multi-volume collections of Homeric Problems in which they sought not only to identify but also to resolve apparent inconsistencies in the Homeric poems.

With the foundation of royally sponsored research institutions like the Ptolemaic Library of Alexandria and the Attalid Library of Pergamum, the rigor, scope, and variety, of Homeric scholarship increased dramatically. Scholars associated with these institutions—and later their successors in Rome—produced numerous critical editions, commentaries, lexica, text-critical studies, and specialized monographs on all aspects of the Homeric poems. Between the third century BCE and the third century CE, scholars based in Alexandria, Pergamum, Rhodes, and Rome produced hundreds of volumes of Homeric scholarship. This was the age of scholars like Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first superintendent of the Library of Alexandria who produced the first critical editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey; Aristarchus of Samothrace, the so-called “best of the grammarians” whose pathbreaking work redirected the course of Homeric scholarship for generations; and Didymus Chalcenterus, whose immense scholarly productivity earned him the nickname Χαλκέντερος, “Bronze Guts.”

If not for the Homeric scholia, nearly all this work would have been lost. At some point in Late Antiquity, unknown scholars created various compilation-commentaries on the Iliad by drawing together—and thereby preserving—tens of thousands of extracts from earlier works of ancient scholarship. One particularly erudite compendium, for example, compiled key works of Homeric scholarship by Didymus (1^st century CE), Aristonicus (1^st century CE), Nicanor (2^nd century CE), and Herodian (2^nd century CE). Another compiled several line-by-line commentaries on the Iliad originally produced in the Roman imperial period, perhaps in the second or third century CE. Though these compendia initially circulated independently from the text of the Iliad, learned scribes later secured their survival by extracting their contents as marginal and interlinear comments in select manuscripts of the poem—that is, by transmitting them as scholia.

Today, our access to ancient Homeric scholarship is overwhelmingly mediated through these scholia, which fill thousands of pages of the most comprehensive critical edition currently available. The ancient scholia to the Iliad thus constitute the richest and most extensive collection of ancient criticism on the most widely read poem in Greco-Roman antiquity. They preserve a remarkable wealth of insights into the constitution of the Homeric text, the readings and editorial principles of ancient grammarians, the literary interpretations of ancient critics, and the lessons that ancient readers took from Homer.

Our series, The Ancient Scholia to Homer’s Iliad: A Translation, of which my book is the first installment, provides the first English translation of this remarkable collection, making this ancient treasure available to modern readers for the first time.